Becoming Woke

I seem to be delving into a lot of reading and film material that is causing me to become "woke." I'm told that is the current word for making oneself aware of one's personal concept of racial issues.

WARNING! Do not watch Netflix's American Son alone. It's an hour and a half of nonending tension concerning an interracial couple dealing with law enforcement regarding their missing son. Because my son is married to Rossllyn, a wonderful black woman, I have two grandsons, who in societal terms, are black. 

I say in societal terms because I remember a commentator at a writers conference in Madison, who posited a question he termed the Alex Haley dilemma. Haley, the writer of the seventies book that was converted into a television miniseries entitled Roots. 

Roots is the story of a young black man who is captured by slave traders and sold as a slave in the colonies. Haley admitted he began writing this tale as a search for his black history. Haley was a mixed-race person. The dilemma is framed in the question, why didn't he write about his Irish heritage?

We know why he didn't, but the question points up something we have been failing to deal with for hundreds of years. Why is it so important that a person with any amount of black DNA is classified as Black, whereas any person with mixed European heritage is white. They are not French English, Italian or whatever blood runs through their veins, they are white, Unless, they choose to identify as one of their line of descendants, as in I'm mostly Irish (97.5) according to Heritage.

I think one of the highest points of the dilemma that was reached in American Son was when the parents were debating the value of giving their son the best education they could afford.  The circumstances of this decision made him the only black kid in his school and deprived him of an understanding of what it was to be black in America. The boy complained to his mother that he was the "face of the race."

In his book The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead writes about black kids in southern Florida that are sent to an orphan's home on the pretense of being cared for. In reality, it was a slave camp of teenagers, The history of the camp shows the difference in treatment between the black kids and the whites kids. The black kids were turned out on the streets when they aged out or at worst were murdered when they didn't knuckle under to their overseers. The enduring problems these young men faced when they were released were life-altering and negative, to say the least.

Is this differentiation universal? Antidotal information says it is not. In the first instance, there is the experience of black people raised in black-majority countries. Even where colonialistic experience taints the society, it appears blacks in those environments don't suffer the extreme discrimination of the American Black. Then there is escape many prominent American black people felt by moving to France where discrimination is less an issue. James Baldwin is one of the most prominent, but by no means the only one. Many of us forget while the Brits were falling in love with Blues and R & B, in the fifties, we were listening to it on "Black Radio."

As I have written before, my frustration with this issue is a personal one. As the white dominate race in our country, any attempt we make to understand or sympathize with the black experience is often greeted with the "You still don't get it." While I'm not excusing myself or any other white person, it's hard to accept that any effort is bound to come up short and therefore is not acknowledged. The movable goalposts might be best exemplified by what is the correct term for minority groups. Are they blacks, negros, or African Americans? And what about that group of Latinos who look like they are black but resist being identified as such.

To me, we are all Americans, and differences might be better defined by whose sports teams we support. Trivial yes, but people in Wisconsin don't discriminate against Bear fans. As a matter of fact,(Wait for it) some of my best friends are Bear fans.

PS: Last night I saw the Film "Queen & Slim" If you want to be informed about what it's like to be Black in contemporary America, this film should be mandatory.